Famine Worries Grow As Rebels Capture Ethiopian Food Supply Centers

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — Rebels in drought-stricken Tigray province have captured two government food distribution centers and attacked a third in recent fighting.

Relief officials said the attacks will cripple the increasingly desperate famine relief effort.

The rebels captured Wukro, a major food center, on Friday, halting emergency food distribution to more than 250,000 people in the province.

About 5,000 people were cut off from emergency food in Abiy Adi. That isolated mountain hamlet is 45 miles west of Mekele, the main distribution site for the U.N.-run airlift of food to Tigray.

''Essentially what this means is that there is going to be catastrophic mass starvation starting almost immediately,'' a Western diplomat said.

The diplomat, who is based in Addis Ababa, was in Wukro three weeks ago. He said the Ethiopian government had kept only five or six days worth of food in Wukro, fearing that the Tigray rebels would attack and take the supplies.

''It's going to hurt us bad,'' said Rick Machmer, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development mission.

More than 1 million people in Tigray are in danger of starving, officials estimate.

A rebel group in the neighboring province of Eritrea fired rockets at the airport of the provincial capital of Asmara. They were trying to destroy government MiG fighters but failed, sources said.

The escalation in Ethiopia's 27-year-old civil war apparently has dashed any hope that Western relief organizations could replenish depleted food stocks.